


Countertransference

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution - All Media Types
Genre: Cocaine, Drug Use, Light BDSM, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You would have me believe that you are a simple man, Freud thinks. Your lies are so masterful. The only person who does not believe the myth of Sherlock Holmes is you.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countertransference

**Author's Note:**

> Freud's function in this story is similar to the function he plays in the movie: a mirror for Holmes. This is not the real Freud. I think it's the "real" Holmes, though. The Seven-Percent Solution is an odd little movie, and very reflective of the time in which it was made, but it has some great moments and its Holmes is probably the most immediately vulnerable of all the adaptations I can think of.

Sherlock Holmes has the sort of pale skin that Freud associates with most englishmen: like milk with a drop of blood in it. With his shirt off, he is a breathtaking man. Collarbones prominent, the fine structure of his ribs and vertebrae visible through the skin. He would be flawless were it not for the chemical burns on his hands, the needle marks on his left forearm and biceps. A thin pink scar winds its way across three ribs before terminating in a stomach-churning twist a hands breadth below his shoulder blade. 

The origin of the first two things is clear. Freud knows nothing about the last. 

This is what he knows: Sherlock Holmes is a fast runner. He once beat a man so severely, behind a pub in the East End, that he does not know if he lived or died. He speaks three languages fluently and he could read the recent history of the cleaning lady in the cast of her hands and the hem of her skirt. 

He is a drug addict, he is vulnerable, he is loved but believes himself to be unloveable. Freud would consume him wholeheartedly, if Holmes let him in.

…

“You know what I want,” Holmes says.

Holmes’ adam’s apple leaps up and down in his throat. A razor nick in the shadow of his jaw, his shaking hands. A man of impulses, and like all men of impulses he gives everything, wants more than he can have. 

I know that it isn’t me you want, Freud thinks. You want something else, a punishment. None of this is what you need.

“What you want? What about what you need?”

“There are few things a man needs,” Holmes says. “Food and water, music perhaps. And you would be surprised how long a man can go without food and still function at an optimal level.”  
You would have me believe that you are a simple man, Freud thinks. Your lies are so masterful. The only person who does not believe the myth of Sherlock Holmes is you.

…

“I do not know if I am a good man.”

“You say this a lot,” Freud says. “What is a good man? Why must you be good? If you were good, would you stop hurting yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Holmes says. 

It is a negative definition, for him. He must be good so he is not bad, so he is not his father. He must right wrongs.

“Dr. Watson is a good man,” Freud allows. “You have his companionship, do you not?”

“Yes,” Holmes says, and his pale, almost inhuman eyes flick around the room. Freud buttons his shirt, pulls on his waistcoat, undoes the loose granny knot that holds Holmes’ right wrist against the bedpost. He can barely remember the warmth of this man’s skin, the pulse that beat against the thin skin over his eyelids and temples. Barely.

“We will talk about this tomorrow,” Freud says. “Get dressed now. Go for a walk.”

Sherlock Holmes came to Vienna with two winter suits, one badly crumpled, and an expensive violin in a cheap cardboard case. In his shaking hands, a dirty pencil stub and a notebook full of manic memoranda. He had nothing else, save the cocaine. When Freud slips his hand into the pocket of Holmes’ greatcoat his hand finds cold metal; a loaded revolver. Dr. Watson accepts it with downcast eyes, and Freud can tell he is only pretending to be surprised.

…

All sharp bones and thinking machine, this man. He should have at least five kilograms more on his frame. He lights a cigarette, striking the match with a sudden movement, then throws the stub into the gutter. Freud watches him as he walks away, his hands down, his face empty. There is something sharp inside him. It hurts when he moves. Blunt, nasty little needles, a man afraid of broken glass.

When he comes back and lies down on the couch again he smells of cold and tobacco and coffee. He cannot keep his hands away from his forearms. Relax, Freud says. You will not remember. Three weeks now, he has been treating this man. The shakes and the screaming fits have gone away, and now he must patch the hole left by the addiction before it returns.

…

I will not hurt you, he wants to say, but can’t.

…

“He used a straight-razor.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Watson shaves himself with a straight-razor. I watch him, while I get dressed. I wait for him, smoke a cigarette. Sometimes he shaves me -- if my hands shake too much -- leans down and wipes away the lather.”

Freud says nothing.

“His hands are always steady.”

Holmes shifts slightly on the couch, and Freud gazes at the neat part in his brilliantined hair, the marks of the bone comb that he keeps in his pocket.

“Who used a straight-razor before that?”

“My father.”

“Your father used a straight-razor to shave himself?”

“My father wore a beard.”

Eight years old, when he found him. He describes in minute detail the blood splatter on the seven-foot ceiling. The moulded plaster at the cornices. Eight years old, Freud thinks. The smell of blood. Fresh, the smell of iron and something else organic. Razor still in his fingers. The sun is setting. Sherlock Holmes speaks these secrets into a room darkening by the minute, and it makes Freud think of long candid train journeys, of the small ashamed things men say in the dark.

…

You are stronger than this, Freud wants to tell Holmes. You have survived this long. But then Freud thinks of a lonely undergraduate in a cold room, a clean needle and a steady hand.

…

Freud breathes in slowly, takes a sip of coffee. “When you awake you will remember nothing of this,” he says, and Holmes as always is so obedient, like a child. They say the intelligent are most vulnerable to suggestion.

When Holmes awakes he stretches his hands toward the ceiling, wipes his face absently. They talk of nothing in particular. 

“I see men with scars on their faces here,” he says. “Usually gentlemen. It is unusual.”

“Duelling scars,” Freud says. “A wound on the face like that is always considered an honourable one.”

Your friend has an interesting mind, he wants to say to Dr. Watson. Oh, but he is not just your friend.

…

The next day, Holmes tells him that the streets sound different here. That the street sellers call in a different language. You cannot walk far in London without hearing a police whistle or a train rattling over a set of points, he says.

Later, like an afterthought, he talks about the chemist where he habitually buys his cocaine. Halfway along the Marylebone road. A gaudy canvas awning, flyspecked advertisements for patent medicines in the window. Freud’s heart aches. For cocaine, for the lofty artificial happiness it brought him, for the clarity.

When Freud hypnotises him he goes easily, like he’s waiting, like he welcomes it.

"How long have you and Dr. Watson been lovers?"

“A long time,” Holmes says. A long silence. He crosses his arms suddenly, violently. 

“I am used to hiding things. I had no family to disappoint. My brother doesn’t care.”

"Do you think it is wrong to love a man?"

Silence.

"Do you?"

"Only if there is deception. Or pain."

Oh, but that would not be love, Freud wants to say.

…

It is two days into the fourth week Freud has been treating this man, and today he has a fine tracery of welts on his narrow shoulders, his hands grasping the bed frame, white at the knuckles, the forearm extensor muscles standing out in clean lines.

“Oh, God,” Holmes says. He has professed himself to be an unbeliever, and Freud is always surprised at the way even atheists call on God when they are in pain. Does he do this because it is what his father said? Because he remembers a time when he believed? What were you like as a child, he wants to ask. Was there a little chapel dedicated to your family of minor fallen aristocrats? Did your tutor, your mother’s lover, sit in the same pew as you? Did your beloved Professor Moriarty kneel beside you?

“Stop,” Holmes says, and he moans into the pillow. The noise sets icy fingers at the base of his spine, a tingle like the hum of an electrical transformer. 

“ _Aufhoren_ ,” Holmes says. “ _Bitte_.” And because this is the word they agreed on, he lays down the riding crop and loosens the knot and leaves Holmes there, his hands by his sides, breathing deeply.

…

Five weeks, and Holmes leans across the single bed and pulls Freud toward himself by the front of his waistcoat. His lips are cold. Freud waits ten, fifteen seconds before he pulls away.

“This is wrong,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He lets the door close behind him, a dry, precise little click.

…

“Where will you go?” Freud says, the taste of his cigar heavy in his mouth, the house so quiet that he can hear the murmuring of voices on the street below.

“I thought perhaps Sussex,” Holmes says. “Country. There will be space around. We can keep bees.”

“We?”

“John and I. Dr. Watson.”

Freud makes a note on his notepad. John.

“Will you do this now?”

“No. I want to go abroad.”

“Why?”

“I wish to disappear.”

…

When Holmes announces that he watched his father kill his mother, something wet and choked in his voice, it is not to his patient that Dr. Freud looks, but to Dr. Watson.

“It all comes together,” he says. 

It is Watson, of course, who he feels he has wronged. It will be a burden on the man, this knowledge. After all, he has created a hero.

…

“I cannot thank you enough, Doctor.” Watson has wet sad eyes and blunt hands. Soldier, Holmes told him. I could see it in the way he held his head.

To Freud, Watson has a bland, intelligent face and he always looks more weary than his friend. Responsibility, Freud supposes. Men like Holmes and I do not know this sort of responsibility, he thinks. We hurt others. We do not hurt, not really. Not in that way.

Freud watches them as they step into the street, arm in arm, walking as gentlemen do. Holmes waits for Watson to step down into the street, lighting a cigarette to disguise his care. Only one of us is a gentleman, Freud thinks. The other two are liars. 

“Fly, Herr Holmes,” he says, and he turns away before the fog of his breath has faded from the glass.

**Author's Note:**

> [nomad1328](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nomad1328/pseuds/nomad1328) is an amazing beta as always. All mistakes are my own.


End file.
